Tag: Puppies

Larry Correia is a Giant Cancer

In the aftermath of yesterday’s blog post about Larry Correia, and the subsequent Arkhaven Nights stream on UATV, a number of people have asked me about the facts of the matter to which Larry was referring in such a dishonest manner to the editor of Baen Books and science fiction professionals. First, here is the email Larry sent out to JDA, Toni Weisskopf, Jason Cordova, Brad Torgersen, and Sarah Hoyt:

From: Larry Correia monsterhunter45@hotmail.com
Date: Thursday, December 11, 2025at 11:02 AM
To: Jon Del Arroz jdelarroz@gmail.com, Toni Weisskopf toni@baen.com, cordova829@gmail.com cordova829@gmail.com, brad.r.torgersen@comcast.net brad.r.torgersen@comcast.net, Sarah Almeida Hoyt scifihoyt@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Interview With Christopher Ruocchio

I’d say I hope you have a nice Christmas with your family, but you probably can’t because of that domestic violence restraining order. Now I’m gonna block this email like I have all your other accounts, you sort of human shaped blob of herpes.

Now let’s address the facts. You may wish to note that I have read the relevant documents, including the restraining and custody orders.

  1. There was a restraining order filed against JDA by his ex-wife in 2023, two months after she filed for divorce. It was not filed on the basis of domestic violence, nor is there any mention of violence, domestic or otherwise, in the order.
  2. The restraining order was requested on the basis of text messages that criticized his ex-wife-to-be’s physically abusive behavior towards their children.
  3. The three-year restraining order was granted eight months later as part of the divorce settlement because the text messages sent to his ex-wife-to-be about her behavior made her feel bad and were characterized as something that “disturbs the peace”.
  4. JDA did not contest the restraining order since a) doing so would be expensive and b) he was not interested in having any contact with his ex-wife over the next three years anyhow.
  5. JDA never committed any violence, never laid a hand on his ex-wife, and was never accused by her or by anyone else of doing so. He was not even within miles of his ex-wife when the exchange of texts that served as the basis for the restraining order took place.
  6. JDA was granted full custody of the children by the court.
  7. JDA absolutely can, and will, spend Christmas with his family, which includes his children by his ex-wife, of whom he has had custody since the divorce.

In other words, Larry Correia attempted to falsely portray a married father who proactively defended his children, and still has custody of those children, as a violent wife-beater who is not permitted to be around his family at Christmastime. And in doing so, he encouraged dozens hundreds of people on social media and on YouTube, including last night on Arkhaven Nights, to post messages saying things like “why did you beat your wife” repeatedly throughout the the stream. I personally witnessed at least 20 of these obnoxious comments from at least four different accounts during the stream.

This is absolutely inexcusable and unprofessional behavior, particularly on the part of a self-styled conservative who purports to be a family man. And that cancerous behavior further exposes Larry Correia’s undeniable lack of character, which we first observed when he encouraged hundreds of Sad Puppies to spend $40 to nominate him for Hugo awards, then fled the field and abandoned his followers the moment the mainstream media took notice of him and started to call him names.

The damning thing is that Larry knew exactly what he was doing. In fact, ten years ago, he was angry about the very sort of behavior he is exhibiting now.

I’m angry. When people who haven’t talked to my wife since high school reach out to her, worried for her safety, because they read about how her husband is a wife beater, I get angry.

Indeed.

DISCUSS ON SG

Independence is Opportunity

Brien Niemeier retrospectively points out what should have been obvious, but wasn’t, to everyone all along:

For most of the twentieth century, creative ambition followed a single script. You studied the field, polished a manuscript, hunted for an agent, and prayed for a contract.

If you were in film or music, the process was different in details but identical in structure: Everything hinged on the approval of an institution. Success came from being chosen. Talent mattered, but luck mattered more. Most creators knew it but kept playing the game because the alternative seemed unthinkable.

That expectation didn’t come from nowhere. It grew out of a period when the gatekeepers could actually elevate an unknown. They possessed the distribution networks, the advertising budgets, the corporate partnerships, and the capacity to manufacture stardom.

That pattern repeated enough times to take on the aura of tradition. If you wanted a career, you knocked on the same doors everyone else knocked on. The problem is that the doors stopped opening long before artists realized the hinges had rusted shut.

By the late 1990s, the blockbuster mentality had consumed the traditional institutions. Every division—publishing, film, television, and music—became obsessed with scale. Risk tolerance flatlined. Executives seeking hits that could justify their salaries clung to anything that produced reliable profit and panicked at the unfamiliar. Innovation came to represent risk instead of opportunity.

At the same time, audiences aged. The properties that kept the lights on were the ones that debuted thirty, forty, or fifty years earlier. Instead of cultivating younger talent, the corporations recycled the same brands over and over, hoping nostalgia would substitute for relevance. You saw endless sequels, remakes, reboots, and spin-offs. The cultural oxygen was consumed by dying giants.

Creators sensed something was wrong, but most didn’t grasp how deeply the rot ran. The old structures no longer had the ability or the interest to launch new creators into the mainstream. The institutions that once acted as kingmakers had lost the will and the means to fulfill that role.

Yet legacy outlets continued promoting the old discovery narrative because it kept the talent pipeline flowing. As long as artists believed salvation waited inside the old system, they wouldn’t look for alternatives.

This conditioning left scars. Many creators still cling to the hope that one good pitch or lucky submission will unlock a career. They believe someone in a skyscraper will pluck them from obscurity and grant them access to an audience. This belief persists despite decades of evidence that the system has no interest in fulfilling creators’ expectations.

Worse, some artists internalized the idea that bypassing the old gatekeepers equates to failure. Seeing independence as a last resort, they imagine legitimacy comes only from institutional approval, even though the institutions abandoned their curatorial role.

That psychology runs deep: Creators were trained to think of themselves not as people who produce value for audiences, but as supplicants waiting for an authority figure to validate them.

The irony is that while creators waited for help, audiences changed faster than the institutions could track. Once internet access became ubiquitous, people stopped caring about traditional pipelines. Their interests moved to quality and authenticity, not pedigree.

The challenge now is that the playing fields are not even close to level. How can a podcaster compete on YouTube or Spotify when he’s banned from one, the other, or as in some cases, both? How can an author compete when the A9 algorithm, or whatever Amazon calls the way it makes winners out of losers and losers out of winners, fails to favor him?

The answer, as we were forced to figure out much, much earlier than most, is direct sales and patronage. That’s why Castalia thrives while many other publishers, including the big ones, are struggling more and more every year. It’s because we were forced to rely on you readers early on, long before

There are still challenges posed by structural elements like the payment processors, but even those challenges are starting to fade as Russia, China, and the BRICS countries improve their financial products. And what that means is that independent creators don’t have to go down with the collapsing mainstream infrastructure.

As AI improves, as the number of options improve, it’s only going to keep getting better for true independents and worse for those who still cling to the idea that the gatekeepers matter, no matter how propped up they might be.

Speaking of the collapse of the mainstream gatekeepers, shame on all of you Rabid Puppies. Shame!

I was in a small bookstore just after the Hugo blow up, and this old guy was asking the clerk for recommendations. She straight face recommended NKJemison, “She won 3 years in a row, and it’s never happened before!” Poor guy.

And that’s why it only takes 11 votes to get nominated for a Hugo these days.

DISCUSS ON SG

Larry Correia is a Big Fat Coward

I’ve tried to give the big fat coward the benefit of the doubt for a long time, but it’s just not possible anymore. His behavior is just too absurd for polite words.

You should understand three things about Larry Correia. First, he doesn’t give a fragment of a rat’s ass about anyone or anything but himself. He left all the people he led into Sad Puppies hanging and abandoned them without a second thought because he’s a little pussy who couldn’t take the heat once the mainstream press got involved. You needn’t take my word for it, just ask him about it and watch him dance like a Riverdancer on a hot plate.

I told him directly and unequivocally that it was a terrible mistake to simply cut and run, and he told me that he didn’t give a damn about the fact that people were spending $40 to participate in Sad Puppies even though he encouraged them to do so. I even told him it was wrong, but he simply did not care. Not even a little bit. The only reason Rabid Puppies came into being was because Larry and Brad were TERRIFIED of being splashed by the mainstream media’s criticism of me.

They’re total fucking cowards. They always have been. The SF-SJWs never understood me, but boy, did they nail him correctly. The International Lord of Hate was actually just the International Lord of Hurt Feelings. One would never have imagined that such a large individual could be such a sensitive little pansy.

And that’s the truth, one that I’ve been concealing for his benefit for more than ten years. But not anymore, because he’s become such an complete and unadulterated prick who just can’t control himself whenever anyone gets more attention than he does. Look at his response to Jon Del Arroz informing Baen Books and the Baen crowd that Fandom Pulse interviewed one of Baen’s authors.

From: Larry Correia <monsterhunter45@hotmail.com>
Date: Thursday, December 11, 2025at 11:02 AM
To: Jon Del Arroz <jdelarroz@gmail.com>, Toni Weisskopf <toni@baen.com>, cordova829@gmail.com <cordova829@gmail.com>, brad.r.torgersen@comcast.net <brad.r.torgersen@comcast.net>, Sarah Almeida Hoyt <scifihoyt@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Interview With Christopher Ruocchio

I’d say I hope you have a nice Christmas with your family, but you probably can’t because of that domestic violence restraining order.  Now I’m gonna block this email like I have all your other accounts, you sort of human shaped blob of herpes.  

I haven’t respected Larry Correia since he ran out on Sad Puppies. But he’s become more and more despicable over the years, and the fact that now he’s taken the ticket shouldn’t surprise anyone. Now he’s openly engaging in libel.

So, Larry, your wife and your family are fair game now. Don’t cry about it, you’re the one who went there and no one made you do it.

Second, Larry’s a coward. He loves to own the libs on Facebook, but he’s too much of a coward to ever stand up for anything that actually matters. He’d disown literally anyone and everything in order to protect his precious book sales, even though he’s never been good enough to get signed by a major publisher in his life. He was afraid to go solo even though I told him he should nearly ten years ago, because he needed the Baen security blanket until it became evident that Baen is not long for this world.

The third thing is that Larry is deeply and fundamentally insecure. That’s why he lashes out at people unnecessarily. That’s what originally motivated Sad Puppies. I don’t know why JDA threatens him, but it’s impossible to miss.

I’ve kept my mouth shut about the fat cowardly cunt out of respect for his past accomplishments, which are legitimate and real. But I think a decade of silence about his observable and undeniable shortcomings is more than sufficient, considering that his behavior is actually getting worse over time. And, as you may recall, I gave him fair warning the last time he spouted off for no reason.

Tune to Arkhaven Nights for more…

DISCUSS ON SG

Grokipedia is Already Better

Elon Musk is correct. Even version 0.1 of Grokipedia is better than Wikipedia. It also points to the way forward for Infogalactic. Who needs editors when you’ve got AI? Here is an excerpt from its entry on Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies:

Theodore Beale, writing under the pseudonym Vox Day and founder of Castalia House publishing, launched the Rabid Puppies campaign on February 2, 2015, as an independent but parallel effort to the Sad Puppies initiative. Beale positioned it as a response to what he viewed as an entrenched ideological clique—derisively termed “CHORFs” (cliquish Hugo-oriented right-thinking fans) and “SJWs” (social justice warriors)—that allegedly controlled Hugo nominations through low-turnout bloc voting favoring message-driven works over entertainment value. Unlike the Sad Puppies’ focus on recommending overlooked popular fiction, Beale explicitly instructed supporters to nominate his slate items “precisely as they are” to maximize disruption and demonstrate the system’s susceptibility to organized external participation, including promotion of Castalia House titles like the anthology Riding the Red Horse.

The 2015 Rabid Puppies slate overlapped significantly with the Sad Puppies recommendations, featuring works such as Jim Butcher’s Skin Game for Best Novel and Edward M. Lerner’s Slow Bullets for Best Novella, but also included Beale’s self-nominated editing credits. This coordination, combined with Rabid supporters’ higher discipline in nominating all slate items, resulted in Puppy-affiliated works occupying most finalist slots across categories, including five of five in Best Novella and Best Short Story—displacing approximately 80% of what would have been conventional nominees based on prior years’ patterns. Hugo nomination tallies, with around 2,000 nominators compared to historical averages under 1,500, underscored the campaigns’ amplification of voter turnout among previously unengaged readers.

In the July 2015 final voting phase, involving about 4,000 ballots, Rabid Puppies nominees frequently ranked below “No Award” in a backlash from established fandom, with Beale’s professional editor nominations receiving the lowest support (e.g., 165 first-place votes out of thousands). Beale framed this as a strategic success, arguing that the widespread “No Award” usage—unprecedented in scale, affecting five categories—exposed the awards’ politicization, as opponents prioritized ideological purity over merit, effectively “burning down” the Hugos rather than allowing non-conforming works to win. He continued the campaign in 2016 and 2017, adapting to rule changes like E Pluribus Hugo by nominating provocative entries such as Chuck Tingle’s satirical Space Raptor Butt Invasion, which secured a finalist spot and amplified mockery of the process, though with reduced dominance (e.g., only partial slate success in 2016). Beale’s efforts, drawing from a dedicated online following, highlighted empirical vulnerabilities in the pre-reform Hugo system, where small, cohesive groups could sway outcomes amid chronically low participation rates below 5% of World Science Fiction Society membership.

In 2016, author Kate Paulk organized Sad Puppies 4, announcing the campaign on September 3, 2015, with a focus on compiling crowd-sourced recommendation lists rather than a strict slate to promote broader participation and avoid accusations of ballot manipulation. The final list, released on March 17, 2016, included only works receiving at least two recommendations across categories, emphasizing entertainment value and fun over ideological messaging. Despite this shift, the campaign exerted limited influence on nominations, as the ballot was overwhelmingly dominated by the parallel Rabid Puppies slate led by Vox Day, which secured 64 of its 81 recommended works on the shortlist across all categories.

It’s a much more detailed, and accurate, account of what really happened. Of course, they never seem to bother mentioning what motivated me to burn down the Hugo Awards, which was the false accusations that I’d somehow “gamed” my 2014 nomination in the Best Novelette category for “Opera Vita Aeterna”. I therefore showed them what gaming a nomination actually looks like when you’re a game designer.

The real success of Sad Puppies, of course, was the inevitable reaction to it. Seriously, SF-SJWs are just reprehensibly stupid. The rules prevented us from permanently burning the whole thing down, so I had to come up with a way to provoke them into doing it themselves.

DISCUSS ON SG

In Which the Cancellers are Cancelled

Worldcon’s death-spiral toward extinction continues apace, as chronicled by Fandom Pulse:

Worldcon used to be the gold standard of science fiction conventions. Creators like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, and more would get together every year to share ideas, build community, and help the genre altogether. It’s a good idea, in theory.In its past, of course, it’s also been mired with controversy, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen using convention rooms as places to rape children, something that long-stained its history when it came out in recent years.

Beyond this, Worldcon had turned its back on conservatives for an extreme-leftist agenda that reared its ugly head in the mid-2010s with the Hugo Awards, when they prioritized politics over good storytelling to the determinant of the award. It never recovered its prestige. It resulted in 2018 having a protest against pedophilia outside of the convention where, oddly, many of the panelists counter-protested against the protest. The implication is that several of those people apparently stand for pedophilia.

In recent years, they’ve had more controversies, such as having the weapons’ manufacturer Raytheon sponsor the convention, heading to China to have the CCP dictate who could be nominated for their awards, and then using their platform to urge that travel to the United States is somehow dangerous as an attack on President Donald Trump and America—despite the convention being in Seattle this year and Los Angeles in the next.

Now, they have posted a blog that turned their entire leftist community on them, not because of pedophilia or extremist political causes, or supporting weapons manufacturers that bomb children in Middle Eastern countries, or for bowing to the human-rights violating CCP, no, the line they’ve drawn is that ChatGPT was used to vet potential panelists for their ever-shrinking convention, as the science fiction landscape has grown so niche that the con organizers simply didn’t know who most of the people were who applied for spots.

At this point, the “science fiction community” as it was known and loved by the likes of Roger Zelazny and Jerry Pournelle is effectively dead. The material being published by the genre publishers is no longer science fiction, the authors are complete nobodies whom nobody either knows or reads, the magazines are no longer being published, and the one healthy subgenre, military science fiction, is entirely written and read by people who have nothing to do with the tattered remnants of what was once a vibrant sub-literary genre.

It’s really remarkable to read Zelazny’s comments on the community in which he lived and the genre he loved, and see how far from his expectations for the future both of them have fallen.

DISCUSS ON SG

The End of Monster Hunter

May also mean the end of Baen Books, if Fandom Pulse’s logic is correct:

Larry Correia has made a Facebook post stating he won’t even begin writing the next Monster Hunter International books until 2026, which means a two-year dry spell of revenue for the embattled publisher. However, it gets even worse, as Correia has stated that this book will likely be his last in the series.

But never fear, there are still monsters and they still need to be hunted. Or, at least, controlled, which is why Monster Control Incorporated is on the job and is being serialized every week at Sigma Game.

I’ve been walking my crush home since last week to protect her from all the creeps walking around. Next week I’m going to introduce myself to her.

Right now, though, I was content to stay in the shadows, watching from a distance as she made her way down the dimly lit sidewalk. Her name was Elise, and she worked the late shift at the diner on 5th and Main. Every night at 11:30, she stepped out, adjusted her bag over her shoulder, and started the six-block walk to her apartment. And every night, I followed.

Not in a creepy way. At least, I hoped not. The city had gotten bad lately—muggers, weirdos, and worse. The kind of things most people didn’t believe in until it was too late. I’d seen the news reports: Missing Persons. Unexplained Attacks. Animal Maulings. The cops didn’t have a clue. But I did.

I knew what was out there.

Elise turned the corner, her fair hair bright under the glow of a flickering streetlight. She was small, and delicate, but moved with a quiet confidence that made my chest tighten. I kept my distance, staying far enough back that she wouldn’t notice me, close enough that I could reach her in seconds if something went wrong.

Something went wrong a lot these days.

Tonight, the air smelled like rain and something else—something musky and wild. My fingers twitched at my sides. I didn’t carry a gun. Guns were too loud, too messy. Instead, I had a knife sheathed at my belt and a length of silver chain wrapped around my wrist.

Elise hummed softly to herself, oblivious. She had no idea what was coming.

Then I heard it—the low, guttural growl from the alley up ahead.

You’ve never seen a monster hunter quite like Horace “Race” Scrubb before. He puts the L in “professional”.

DISCUSS ON SG

I Did Warn Them

I wasn’t even remotely surprised by the SF-SJWs reaction to the triumphant Puppies’ campaigns. But I did find it a little ironic that a group of people who were supposed to be at least modestly conversant with science clearly weren’t familiar with Newton’s Third Law.

The Hugo Awards have been embroiled in controversy too many times in the last decade to have much relevancy anymore. Once known as science fiction’s Oscars, the publishing industry has turned off most casual readers from their incessant political activism and gotten to a point where it’s hardly notice anymore who’s winning these ballots.

Back in 2016, it took a lot of votes to get a nomination for the Hugo Awards. 3,695 ballots were cast for Worldcon that year, and you’d find familiar names for Best Novel such as Neal Stephenson and Jim Butcher among the list of those nominated ,even though much more niche works eventually won…

All of these problems have only compounded in recent years as more people have tuned out.

By the numbers, the best novel category had 3,695 ballots in 2016. In 2024, even after the controversy in China, there were 1,420 ballots cast,. This year, however, only 1,078 ballots were cast for the most popular category, less than thirty percent of a decade ago.

Once you understand how convergence works, then you know what is going to happen, even if it takes years for the inevitable to play itself out. In fairness to the SF-SJWs, though, this was only a very small part of a large societal trend in the same direction which has rendered many, if not most organizations totally incapable of performing their original functions.

Both the SFWA and the Hugo Awards are already dead from the perspective of their original purposes. It shouldn’t be much longer before they both go the way of the now-defunct Nebula Jury, the Campbell Award, and World Fantasy’s Lovecraft statuette.

DISCUSS ON SG

Churchill, FDR, and Stalin

Back in the days when the Sad Puppies were the #GamerGate of the science fiction world, I reached a gentleman’s agreement with Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen, two of the first three leaders of the Sad Puppies, after they decided that they did not want to be directly connected to me or the group that became known as the Rabid Puppies. I told them at the time that this separation was a mistake for them, and that there were more Rabid Puppies than Sad Puppies, but they refused to believe that and insisted it was necessary for reasons that I will leave to them to explain.

However, they did agree that given the amount of media scrutiny we were all under, it would serve little purpose for us to attempt to speak for, or about, each other in public. All three of us knew that the media was going to try very hard to utilize anything that we would say to undermine the others. To their credit, and to mine, none of us gave the media any material for ten years.

Unfortunately, I have now concluded it is time to end that gentlemen’s agreement because a) it is now clear and undeniable that these are two men who are not, and perhaps never were, on the side of what is right or what is true, b) they are not gentlemen, and c) they have been repeatedly lying about one of my authors for several years. Therefore, I sent both of them this email last night.

Gentlemen,

This is just a heads-up that I am concluding our gentlemen’s agreement. It’s absolutely fine that you don’t like Del Arroz. But you’re both blatantly and very publicly lying about one of my authors, and you’ve both been behaving in an unprofessional manner. I do not find this acceptable.

You’re certainly free to think what you like and you can call me all the names in the book that strike your fancy. You can even get an early start on it, if you like, since I’ll be quoting both of you at length tomorrow.

Regards, etc.
Vox

Now, to a certain extent, this is a tempest in a teapot. Literally no one in our greater community has given a quantum of a damn about what Larry Correia thinks ever since he opted out of leading the Sad Puppies more than a decade ago. Being a flagrant Never-Trumper, a civic nationalist, and a Mormon, he’s as irrelevant to the tens of thousands of Castalia, Arkhaven, and Unauthorized fans as I am to his readership. And I doubt more than two percent of our community has ever even heard of Brad Torgersen.

But nevertheless, as we’ve seen again and again, what permits wickedness to thrive is the tolerance and the silence of those who know better. And what Larry and Brad have been doing for years, the twisted rhetoric they have been repeatedly attempting to pass off as the truth, is neither good, nor beautiful, nor true. They no longer merit respect or restraint on my part.

Here are a few examples of the unacceptable behavior to which I am referring. It should be clear to any impartial observer that Larry Correia is a vulgar midwit with very poor judgment on matters personal, professional, and political.

  • Jo Bird almost nothing you wrote there is accurate. That is common when you get your news from a known pathological liar. You not getting the venom isn’t my problem. I’ve dealt with this piece of shit for years and believe he is a malignant sociopath. Lots of people have seen this in action and know. Then someone like you comes along, people explain why he’s despised, then he farms those comments about his history to make more content playing the victim. It’s a big tiresome scam. The reason people don’t like to talk about him directly is he gets off on the attention.
  • Everything this fucker says is a twisted lie. There are two types of non-lefty authors. Those who have been conned into thinking JDA isn’t a piece of shit, and those who have found out that JDA is actually a piece of shit.
  • His “anonymous sources” are the demons he’s possessed by.
  • You’re just a narcissistic grifter. You’re not on my team. You’re on a team that consists of you and your bizarrely over inflated ego. Everybody is wise to your schtick except a handful of mopes who buy into your exaggerated fake Christian, alpha male, try hard act. They don’t realize that behind the scenes you wanted so hard to write for us that you were an annoying, cloying, suck up, and you got rejected, not for politics, but because you’re just not that good, and you’ve had a chip on your shoulder ever since. The only writers who haven’t cut ties with you are the ones who haven’t yet clued in to your scam, just like I tried to help you when you first got blackballed, until I clued in on your scam. But you’ll fuck them over too in order to score some points for yourself eventually, because you can’t help yourself. Then once they realize you’re just a weird creepy asshole, you’ll make yourself out to be the victim and they’re sell outs. It’s who you are. Now seriously. Fuck off. I’m sure you’ll go write some posts and do some videos about how I’m a sellout loser cuck gamma soyboy or whatever, and you’ll get a couple hundred hits maybe, and I’ll be happy to go back to ignoring you.
  • Jon is a sociopathic grifter who goes through life trying to insert himself into other peoples’ troubles to try and score clout for himself. He starts shit for others and then cries how he’s a victim. When you take exception to him fucking people over for clout he will say everybody but him is a secret leftist sell out and you just hate him because he’s “Christian”. Do not trust him. He’s fucking cancer. Seriously. I can’t accentuate this enough. Trust him at your own peril. That dude is the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing.
  • You stupid motherfucker. The press wants Trump to be the nominee. They give him endless free coverage. They make sure he sucks all the air out of the room. They want you low information dipshits to push him through the primary. They know Trump is easiest to beat in the general. And on the off chance he wins, they already know how to reliably manipulate him.
  • ONLY Trump can win the White House and to prove that he points us to… Richard Baris? Holy fuck. And I’d point you to cold cruel reality where half of America despises Trump, his candidates get trounced, and that’s before he’s a convicted felon. Like seriously. (Insert Generic Vanilla Republican here) would be a better choice to win in the general because of Trump’s ridiculous baggage. People are sick of the democrats, but they are also sick of Trump’s shit. The only people who aren’t sick of his shit are the Trumpkins who eat that clown show up, but as the last elections demonstrated, they turn out far less than the moderates who hate his guts.

In summary, Larry Correia does not know the truth, he does not tell the truth, and he is not, by his own profession, on our team. As for Brad Torgersen, everything he is can be encapsulated in one single statement.

  • May the Lord take Trump in his sleep tonight.

That’s no way to talk about the man who was not only the second-greatest President that the USA has ever known in his first presidential incarnation, but is presently leading America in a desperate war for national survival against the Deep State, the Deep Church, and Clown World.

Just as Neil Gaiman’s fans were given sufficient opportunity to observe that there was something fundamentally wrong with the man before it became impossible to deny, fans of Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen should now be aware that they are not the sort of men they are often assumed, in ignorance, to be. They, their colleagues, and their supporters can spin and posture and spew all the vulgar rhetoric they like, but the truth will inexorably expose them for who and what they are.

Ten years ago, Larry compared the three of us to three WWII leaders. “Look at it like this. I’m Churchill. Brad is FDR. We wound up on the same side as Stalin.”

It was an apt comparison. As you may recall, Stalin won.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Pointlessness of Posturing

Either a number of people associated with Baen Books are less dialed-in to what is happening on the business side than they believe themselves to be or they desperately need lessons in some of the basics of public relations.

  • PR 101: Never deny anything that you know someone else can prove.
  • PR 102: Never get into a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.

Larry Correia posted a long-winded rant both on his blog and on X regarding the piece, opening with the personal attack, “So I hear certain people are trying to stir up outrage clicks spreading dumb rumors about some publishers again.”

Our article, however, does not contain any speculation, only a reporting of facts that have been verified and direct commentary from several Baen Books authors and employees, as previously noted.

Correia did, however, elaborate that he intends to diversify his book portfolio from Baen Books even further in the coming years. He said, “Here, I’ll even add to the freak out, I’m also going to be doing some pure indy stuff in the future too. Why? Because I can, and I want to see what happens when I do. It has been a long time since I’ve experimented in that, the market has changed a ton since then, and has a lot of potential. I like making money. Me doing an indy project might make money. Go figure.”

Many of Correia’s fans reacted to his rant, voicing support for the author and making odd comments mocking his “career-ending,” responding to everything he said but not any of the information in Fandom Pulse’s article, as Correia obfuscated as to what the topic was at hand.

Former Sad Puppy Sarah A. Hoyt, who was dropped from Baen due to her poor sales and is not an American, replied with a bizarre comment, “Yeah. People asked, so I actually read the idiocy. It’s all a thinly veiled tissue of hallucinations…. Having been the subject of such ‘reporting’ before, I’m not even amused.” It’s unclear what she’s talking about.

It doesn’t take a genius to observe that Baen Books is unlikely to survive the loss of Larry Correia to both a) another publisher and b) going independent. Perhaps some of the people quoted don’t know this, but Baen is 25 percent owned by Tor Books and has a very limited number of distribution slots through its distribution partner. As with most mainstream publishers, it is heavily dependent upon its bestselling author or two propping up the rest of its authors.

This is the problem that Tor Books faces as well. The reason John Scalzi was given a massive lead author contract was because Tor needed to replace Brandon Sanderson, the late Robert Jordan, and the game tie-in business that it lost, unfortunately for Tor and Scalzi, he has been unable to do so. He still sells, he just doesn’t sell well enough.

The fact that Larry Correia walked means that Baen Books couldn’t afford the right of first refusal to his new series, which is hardly surprising. I told Larry back in 2015 that he should go independent and I’ve expected to see him do so ever since Brandon Sanderson demonstrated how high the ceiling can be for an independent author. The fact that he was willing to prop up Baen for nearly ten years longer than he probably should have from a financial perspective is testimony to his loyalty and gratitude to his longtime publisher.

But Baen has been circling the drain for years anyhow, because its business practices are out of date. It ignored the authors it should have been courting – including Nick Cole, Jason Anspach, John C. Wright, JDA, and myself, among others – while also ignoring the advent of crowdfunding and the negative impact of Kindle Unlimited. And now its window of opportunity has closed.

People can preen and posture all they like, but what will be will be. And it’s both foolish and futile to get one’s panties in a bunch over educated observers simply noting what has happened, what is happening, and what is likely to happen. Let bygones be bygones and make hay while the sun is shining; just yesterday one of my more vehement past critics and I achieved mutual understanding on a potential future project with excellent prospects for both of us; whether we follow through on it or not, the mere fact of our discussion is a testimony to the professional approach to these things.

I may not be fond of John Scalzi, just to give one example, but if the man ever decides he wants to do a deluxe edition of Old Man’s War in leather, I’ll not only agree to work with him, I’ll guarantee him that we will make him a higher-quality and more attractive edition than Easton or Folio Society will give him. Because an important part of being professional is learning how to set aside one’s personal predilections.

DISCUSS ON SG

Baiting Sarah

This is one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard. But I have no doubt that it is true and that her suspicions about the intentions of the Feds contacting her are entirely correct:

Sarah Hoyt posted to X, “You know what’s REALLY creepy? In the run-up to Jan 6th, we had a lot of “first time commenters” drop by my blog trying to convince me to attend. At the time we were PROFOUNDLY broke and some of them even offered to pay my way. Out of the blue.”

She continued, “I didn’t accept because I didn’t see any purpose to the gathering. I still don’t. (Yes, I understand Trump might have thought he could shame the House into doing the right thing. That level of naivite shocks me, still.) BUT—”

“Well in the aftermath I wondered. I still do. None of those IDs commented on my blog again, funnily enough. It’s probably nothing, but it does make one think,” she concluded.

I was similarly approached prior to the fake Unite The Right rally in 2017. That was the event that was staged in Charlottesville, Virginia and designed to entrap nationalists and tar them as “white supremacists”. I was contacted by Richard Spencer and asked to be a speaker at the event, which, of course, I declined, being neither a white supremacist nor a political activist despite what the fantasists of Wikipedia might erroneously claim.

However, I think it was more than just Mrs. Hoyt being a contributor to Instapundit that caused her to be targeted. GamerGate left a lasting impression on the government-media complex, the entire literary world is still butthurt about Sad Puppies, and her being the head of the Sad Puppies rebellion almost certainly put her on the top of their list of problematic badthinkers to be discredited.

It’s amusing, of course, since Sarah is a die-hard civic nationalist, a self-styled “American born in Portugal,” who deplores genuine nationalism nearly as wholeheartedly as the average globalist. But those who think in symbols rather than in coherent syllogisms are seldom concerned with the logic of their actions or what is truly in the hearts of their intended victims.

Of course, Richard Spencer was a fraud, which I realized soon after interviewing him and seeing how shallow his claimed beliefs were. He’s just an actor playing the role of a villain.

One of the United States’ foremost white supremacists, Richard Spencer, has called for followers to vote for Kamala Harris in the upcoming elections.

DISCUSS ON SG